About PovertyCure, Lopez notes that “the project asks if we have been raising ‘the wrong questions’ about the causes of poverty and how to address them.” She goes on to quote Rudy Carrasco, the United States Regional Facilitator for Partners Worldwide, who said this in relation to the PovertyCure mission: “Everybody has capacity, talent, and ability. Everybody has responsibility. Everybody has stewardship responsibility. I don’t care what dirt hovel you’re living in, in Brazil or Mexico City or Manila. You have a responsibility to be a steward of the resources under your control because you have a heavenly Father who has put great things inside of you, that [are] waiting to be called out and developed and extracted.”

Religious people have a big role to play in the defense of freedom, Lopez says.

“When freedom is divorced from faith, both freedom and faith suffer,” Father Sirico writes in a new book, Defending the Free Market. “Freedom becomes rudderless, because truth gives freedom its direction. Freedom without a moral orientation has no guiding star. On the other hand, when a people surrenders [its] freedom to the government — the freedom to make moral, economic, religious, and social choices and then take personal responsibility for the consequences — virtue tends to waste away and faith itself grows cold.”

The nuns on the bus may not be cheerleaders for the bishops or the Fortnight for Freedom, but their road trip can be a helpful accompaniment. Fundamentally, this debate we’re having about God and Caesar is about much more than a presidential election: It’s about who we are as a people and whether we do not merely tolerate but welcome — and even encourage — religious believers as economic and political participants. The sisters and the bishops are on the same page there.

The New York Timesinterviewed Rev. Robert A. Sirico about a movement by professors at Duquesne University, a Catholic school in Pittsburgh, to organize a union. The Times writes that, “Duquesne is arguing that its affiliation with the Spiritans, a Roman Catholic order, affords it a special exemption from the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board. It’s a conflict between church and state, the school’s lawyer argues, to allow workers to file for a union election.” Rev. Sirico, Acton’s president and co-founder, responded to the question of whether or not “the importance of unions in Catholic teaching is historically contingent.”

“In the industrial revolution, the church was concerned about communism, and not just capitalism but savage capitalism,” Father Sirico said. “People were being brutalized. That’s just not the case in Pittsburgh today.”

The Times piece provoked a harsh response from America Magazine’s In All Things blog. In “Sirico Completely Wrong on Church’s Support for Unions,” Vincent Miller, the Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture at the University of Dayton, said it was “hard to find the proper tone to engage so serious a distortion.”

The Church’s support for unions based on Natural Law. They are forms of “private society” that serve the interests of their members within the context of the common good. The argument is based on natural law, not on any relativistic read of specific needs which vary from decade to decade. The natural right of such socieities to exist is a fundamental part of the doctrine of Subsidiarity, which pundits like Fr. Sirico are so fond of quoting without ever understanding.

In the final installment of a three-part interview with Patheos, Joseph E. Gorra interviews Acton Institute president and co-founder Rev. Robert Sirico about social justice and his interpretation of its right societal implementation. In the interview, Sirico outlines some of the principles highlighted in his new book, Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy. To begin, Gorra asks Sirico about the proper interaction between politics, specifically economics, and religion. What follows is an intriguing discussion on faith-based activism and the origins of the term “social justice”:

Gorra: You are making some important distinctions here, which perhaps also have some cash-value when discussing ‘social justice.’ For it is often conceptualized with wealth distributionist and equalitarian notions. Why is that a mistake, and is there an older (pre-Rawlsian), more robust concept of social justice that can be recovered?

Sirico: The term “social justice” originates with 19th-century Italian Catholic thinkers who were trying to apply the Church’s teaching on the nature of justice and the common good to the post-Enlightenment, post-mercantilist world. In many ways, it is a synonym for “the common good,” which are the conditions that must exist in a given society if people are to be able to freely pursue human flourishing. In that sense, it is not value-neutral—as Rawls more-or-less tries to be—nor can it be reduced to efforts to equalize everything by eliminating differences or vast exercises in wealth-redistribution. Indeed, if you read some of the Italian writers on this subject—Blessed Antonio Rosmini being a good example—you discover that one of the things which they were trying to do was to remind individuals and communities that they also have responsibilities to their neighbor, and that they cannot and should not expect the state to do everything in this regard.

The “social” of social justice did not translate for them into a vast impersonal welfare state; rather, it was primarily about people fulfilling their responsibilities in justice to their neighbor in the circumstances they found themselves, with the state playing a subsidiary role.

Raleigh Gresham is senior pastor at Fellowship Bible Church in Colorado Springs. His passion is to help people understand that church is more than what we do on Sundays but reaches into all areas of our lives. He has begun a new way of interacting with the congregation through a concept called “Gathered & Scattered.” Join us as we listen to his hopes and dreams for the church today and a powerful example of a small win he saw while leading FBC on this journey toward becoming a church that “just loves people.”

What does a school bus driver, a garbage collector, an antiques dealer, and an oil lobbyist all have in common? According to the Department of Labor, they all have “green jobs.”

This exchange between House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa House and senior U.S. Labor Department officials is both absurd and amusing. But it’s also an important reminder that there can be a wide gap between the official government denotation of a term and its popular connotation (such as “green jobs” referring to work directly related to protecting the environment). While Governmentese may sound like English it often requires a translator to understand what a bureaucrat or politicain is really saying.

He’s joined by economist Jennifer Roback Morse, a Catholic economist and founder and president of the Ruth Institute. The short video distills the fact that opposition to HHS Mandate is not about the morality of contraception or even abortion. It is about religious liberty and maintaing the freedom of religion that our Founders realized was so important to a free society. The mandate is uniting Catholics, evangelicals and people from all beliefs to stand for religious freedom.

Marc Vander Maas and I just produced a podcast on Calvin Coolidge for Radio Free Acton. I have been doing a lot of research on the 30th president this year and have had the privilege of speaking about Coolidge in a few different settings. My recent Coolidge commentary for Acton is here.

One of the questions Marc asked me was about the ways in which Coolidge aligned with the thinking of the Acton Institute and in what ways he diverged from Acton thinking. I got so into the ways that he aligns with Acton in the interview but I neglected to address his divergence. Where Coolidge’s thinking parts with Acton is of course on trade. Coolidge, like many political leaders of his era, was a protectionist. He supported high tariffs on imports and advocated for government action to strengthen protectionist policies.

The podcast is a good introduction to Coolidge and his ideas. The 1920s era jazz music helps to set the tone. Listen below:

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The Spring 2012 issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality (15.1) has been posted at www.marketsandmorality.com and should be arriving in print to our subscribers sometime soon in the coming weeks.

In this issue, Jordan Ballor addresses Christian attitudes toward business across confessional lines and throughout history in his editorial. Sam Gregg and Philip Booth respond to Daniel K. Finn’s Controversy contribution from last issue. In further exploration of the convergence (or lack thereof) between libertarian philosophy and Roman Catholic social teaching, Bridget Kratz and Walter Block argue for common ground on the topic of immigration. Charles McDaniel and Marek Tracz-Tryniecki engage the all-too-relevant subject of financial crisis, the former pointing to insights from the Austrian, post-Keynesian, and Distributist schools of thought and the latter in the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. Edward O’Boyle and Walter Schweidler (translated by Philip Harold) each offer contributions on the subject of human development. Johan van der Vyver examines federal and family barriers to children’s rights. Hunter Baker reflects on social justice, government, and society. Michael D’Emic demonstrates the logical identity of the sixteenth-century, Spanish scholastic Saravia de la Calle’s understanding of just price and modern equilibrium theory. Matthew McCaffrey engages three recent works on the morality of the marketplace in his review essay. We have another installment of our Symposium, offering papers from the Evangelical Theological Society’s Theology of Work and Economics consultation. This issue also has yet another stellar Reviews section (if I do say so myself). And lastly, this issue’s Scholia offers an update and translation (respectively) of two works of the English bishop John Jewel on the moral issue of usury, a selection from his commentary on 1 Thessalonians and some private notes that were written in Latin and never before translated into English.

The ongoing debate about food trucks here in Grand Rapids took a step forward this week, as this past Tuesday the city commission “voted unanimously to amend its zoning ordinance so that food trucks can operate on private property for extended periods of time.”

As I argued late last year, “There’s perhaps no more basic way to serve another person than to provide them with food,” and food trucks are something that ought to be welcomed rather than disdained in the context of a vibrant and variegated urban social space.

It’s called free enterprise and we should be embracing it no matter who is on the receiving end of its disruption…. The more we build the experience of downtown Grand Rapids as a great place to spend time, the more everyone doing business in downtown Grand Rapids will benefit.

Let’s get out of the way…and celebrate greater food choice in Grand Rapids.

While things have taken a step forward in Grand Rapids, the fight for food trucks and free enterprise continues throughout the country, and bears watching. The interaction between regulations and the non-profit sector is of particular interest, as both charitable ministry efforts as well as the formation of non-profit advocacy groups have been impacted by governmental policies.